Adventures of Mark and Dan – Hostels

Posted By: dan | Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Adventures of Dan & Mark

Hostels are Ok. I’m getting closer to the point where I’d rather stay in a hotel room, but you miss so much culture when you stay in a hotel.

Let’s take for example the hostel we stayed at in Toronto. This was a house converted into a hostel. Rooms with 6 bunk beds for 12 people to sleep. Stinky for sure – but cheap.

I’ll never forget this one because one of the nights we slept there I made the mistake of not falling asleep first. Some Aussie dude (cause those Aussie dudes are everywhere) was sleeping in the top bunk caddy corner from mine. Well, he fell asleep before me and started snoring. I’m not talking about the kind that you see depicted in “Dennis The Menace” cartoons, I’m talking about the kind of snoring that shakes the trees. I actually had to get down from my bunk, find a shoe, get back up in my bunk and threw the shoe at him to wake him. (Don’t worry I pretended to be sleeping for so long, that I must have fallen asleep).

Then there was the hostel in Ljubljana, Slovenia. I won’t forget this place either. There was no snoring there, but after the lights went out I heard all kinds of things scurrying around me. When we turned on the lights, we found that my bunk and the one above me were infested with thousands of little bugs. Needless to say, I slept on the floor – on my backpack.

But my favorite hostel was in Salzburg, Austria. Unlike the other two it was very clean and there were no snoring problems. Nevertheless, like the other two I got very little sleep. In fact I spent the entire night on a loveseat in the common area. I spent the entire night chatting with a young lady from New Zeland. We talked all night and it felt like we’d been friends forever. She was the first person I fell in love with. Whether it was puppy love or not, I don’t know. I was 21 years old. I just know that I never knew her name, have never seen her since but still smile at the memory.

Hostels are great places to experience life.

Ever stay in a hostel? I’d love to hear your story. Please share it!
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Adventures of Mark and Dan -Lost in Ljubljana, Slovenia

Posted By: dan | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Adventures of Dan & Mark, Ever Been There Before?

Ever get lost in Ljubljana, Slovenia? In the course of two days, we had two incidents where we were lost. Maybe getting lost is normal for you, but for us – it’s extremely rare. Both of us are the kind of guys that really have no issue with directions or maps. I wouldn’t even get nervous in the woods knowing which direction to head. That’s just us.

Ljubljana skyline, including Ljubljana Castle
Image via Wikipedia

Early one morning Tom, my brother, and I decided to go for a jog. We knew there was a “Central Park” type place so headed there and actually found a paved jogging trail. (That I didn’t expect). So we took off on a relatively leisurely run.

The paved trail was nice and wide with pretty street lights lining the roads. I don’t know when it dawned on us, but after an hour we realized that we were no longer in the park and didn’t seem to be heading back to the city yet. We found a jogger who spoke English and asked how to get back to town and was told to keep following the trail.  He just failed to tell us that it a 13 mile trail.

After following some back roads and stopping many more joggers, we ended up finding our way back in about an hour. But let me say, that was a long hour.

Then later that day, not the next day. That day. Mark and I decided we’d go get reservations for our ship ride. Tom and Szabi decided they’d hang out a bit and then would meet us at the train station where we’d have a better idea of which train to catch.

It must have taken us longer at the ship reservation place than all of us thought it would because when we got to the train station, Tom and Szabi were not there. They had waited so long, they’d come looking for us.  For the course of another “nervous” hour, Mark and I went searching for Tom and Szabi who were searching for us.

And then it started to rain.

In the end we all kept our wits about us and made our way back to the hostel – probably thinking when in doubt meet at the common meeting place.  For my little brother’s first trip to Europe, I was nervous. Very nervous.

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Adventures of Mark and Dan Part 9

Posted By: dan | Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Adventures of Dan & Mark

by Dan

It was just after college, maybe February 1997 when I moved out for good. I got a job in Bloomington, Illinois working for a truck stop company. It was a great gig and was hopefully the stepping stone I needed to get back to Romania (that’s  a different story). You see, since 1994 my goal has been to build, own and operate my own resort in Romania.

But I stop digressing and get back to the story. I’d lived there for some time living in a small apartment pretty near work. My life consisted of work during the day in the office learning the trade of an executive assistant and then after 5:00 I’d switch and work in one of the profit centers of the truck stop.

For a while I’d work in the restaurant and then behind the fuel desk and sometimes in the travel store. After a while I’d learned a lot about the operations of the truck stop – but to some degree – at the expense of my early 20’s.  Working at the truck stop was what I did.

And as in all stories of this nature, along comes Mark. He decided to come visit for a while and hang in Illinois. I didn’t work in the truckstop after 5 while he was, just went home eager to hang out and do something. Anything.

Shortly after arriving we went out and bought a new futon for the living room. This was a major purchase for me, at the time, and I actually bought a very nice oak framed futon. Sitting next to the couch I’d received as a gift from friends in high school, it looked stately.

It wasn’t two days later that we somehow broke it. We were playing some sort of tackling game in the living room and instead of using the old beat up couch – we used the new expensive one. Crack! The wood split. I ended up mending it with lots of “L” brackets and screws. It never looked quite ’stately’ again.

Then one day while we were out and about I got misty-eyed. I turned toward my driverside window to avoid Mark’s seeing my glassy eyes, but it was no use. He said, “Dude, what’s wrong man?”. And then I couldn’t help it. The tears and blubbery started. For a few minutes in the car in a parking lot, I couldn’t stop.

I think I was so happy to have someone around, a friend. I was so happy to be doing something with Mark – not sitting alone at the apartment. I’m not sure I was afraid of life after Mark went home; I think I had been lonely so long that it all came out.

After that point, I was fine. I ended up with great friends there. And met my wife there. But I remember that day quite vividly. I remember knowing how important it is to have friends around. I remember learning how important it was to have friends.

Thanks, Mark.

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Adventures of Mark and Dan Part 8

Posted By: dan | Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Adventures of Dan & Mark, Growing up Military

by Dan

I’m not sure I’d say I learned a lesson, but I definitely feel like I solidified a realization.
Mark and I hung out in Ft. Lauderdale today, and had a pretty good job time hanging out at the beach, watching the college kids enjoy their Spring Break. To some degree it made me feel quite a bit older. Guys playing football on the beach, girls sunning, others boogy-boarding. It all seemed like such a long time ago that these activities seemed normal and ordinary.

So being in South Florida, the home of great clubs and nightlife, we thought we head back to the clubs after dinner and check out the South Florida night life. Well, driving past the bars and seeing all the kids handing over balcony railings, congregating around bouncers, standing in ‘cover charge’ lines – it all seemed so young.

It wasn’t that we seemed old, because we could have easily bought a few drinks and danced at the clubs. But the idea of buying drinks and standing around looking “cool” until the dancing started seemed so naive and young. I didn’t feel old, I felt like kids just didn’t understand how much better life could be.

So we left there without even getting out of the car.I absolutely love dancing – but I like dancing on my own terms.

What if  you could go to a place to meet people, have fun, go dancing, and drink whatever you wanted without having to look cool? Without having to wait until 11:00 to start dancing? Without having to “break the ice” just to meet cool people?

Have you ever sat next to someone on a plane and you just clicked with them? You talked about stuff you had in common, places you liked to visit and life in general. Well that’s the place I realized doesn’t really exist outside that plane. So I guess I realized that kids don’t know how cool it is to enjoy life as yourself.

I decided I don’t want to be cool anymore. I’d like to go the rest of my life without ever having to look cool.  I left there knowing that I didn’t belong there because “waiting to dance” isn’t nearly as fun as dancing whenever the feeling hits you.

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Adventures of Mark and Dan Part 7

Posted By: dan | Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Adventures of Dan & Mark

by Dan

We’d left Colorado several hours ago and had just arrived in Salt Lake City, Utah. This was our “big” trip. Leave from Omaha, drive all the way to Los Angeles and return via Las Vegas. Of all our road trips, this one seemed to be the biggest. Sure the Canada trip was just as far – but it didn’t seem as big.

We had no place to stay – well to clarify that – we never have a place to stay. What’s the fun of that? So we were driving around Salt Lake looking for a hotel with some occupancy – nada. Nothing. Apparently there was a Police Convention in town and all the hotels were booked. So, being that Salt Lake is one of the most boring towns  (during the summer), we decided to just leave there and find accomodations somewhere down the road.

For some reason I was driving. That didn’t happen often, but it did this time. I was in the left hand turn lane at a stop light and proceeded to turn left when the light turned green. Well, I didn’t make a wide enough turn and cut across what appeared to be a striped median before entering my lane of traffic. It wasn’t striped. It was a hole of some sort and this hole popped both passenger side tires. Both of them.

So we pulled over to the side of the road, called AAA and waited for the tow truck to arrive. For what seemed like an eternity and beyond the sunset, we waited. Finally, the tow truck arrived and took us back downtown to a garage. Back downtown where there were no hotel rooms.

We headed across the street to a book store/cafe/coffee bar if I remember correctly and bought some light dinner fare. I believe I had something with moldy raspberries. (I forget what Mark had).

And then we headed back to the car. We reclined the seats, locked the doors, covered ourselves from head to toe with blankets and feigned sleep. We were obviously first in line the next morning to get into the garage. And then hours later, off we went to the Biggest Little City in the West – Reno, NV, where we amazed ourselves by finding free money left in slot machines and won money with money they gave us. (But that’s another story).

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Adventures of Mark and Dan Part 6

Posted By: dan | Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Adventures of Dan & Mark

by Dan

We were living in Frisco, CO one summer and working at Keystone Resort. Mark was working room service and I was working conference services. We’d interviewed at Vail (as you heard in a previous Mark and Dan short) but ended up at Keystone because the people were more down-to-earth. We were renting a condo from a girl who’d gone to Denver to take classes for the summer. To create as little a disturbance as we could muster and in so doing be great tenants, we decided to share a bedroom so the gal didn’t need to pack up her stuff.

All was good. An entire condo to ourselves (other than her room) for the summer. To top it off, it was in a relatively good location over-looking a lake and had a cool layout. We ended up working opposite schedules most of the time. But we did end up hanging out a couple days a week and heading to Alice’s bar (for crappy dancing) occasionally.

Then one day about four weeks later – she moved back in. No notice. She was just back.

This infuriated Mark. Me, I thought she was sexy and didn’t mind as much. But, I did think it was wrong that she didn’t ask, that she didn’t lower the rent, that she had friends over often and ‘took over the place’. Mark was right to be mad. Mostly, she was out of line and lied to us about our original deal. She actually told us that she’d planned to come back all along. One night we had a discussion – turned argument – turned discussion – which resulted in us leaving the condo, the resort, the mountains and Colorado. If only she had said ‘hey guys, classes sucked – can we modify the deal so I can move back in for a while?”.

Don’t fret though, we headed straight to Olathe, KS where we met up with some ladies we’d met in Frisco, earlier that summer. But that’s another story. Good thing we had to leave!

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Adventures of Mark and Dan Part 5

Posted By: clippershiptravel | Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Adventures of Dan & Mark

By Dan

We went in search of some land Mark’s dad was interested in. We went in a Pontiac Grand Am. Mark drove the Pontiac from Omaha to Illinois and then we left. We went on a journey to Canada.

The land was near Mont Tremblant. I’d give you better directions, but those are the directions we had. I believe we had a city tax map with the parcel outlined on the map. I was a rookie at viewing tax maps and thought “How hard could this possibly be? We have a map.”

In the U.S. parcels of land are not legally platted if they are landlocked without access to some sort of public road or right-of-way. At 35, this is common knowledge. Back then – not so much. I don’t think Canada has the same rules – or at least they didn’t.

We got to Mont Tremblant, near Quebec, and had ourselves a pretty good time. It’s a great little mountain, ski town. It’s quaint has neat shops, dancing, bars, restaurants, places with fancy scarves. The property we were seeking – it was not here.

We took the roads as far as they could take us until we found a dirt road that seemed to be the most direct route toward the parcel on the map. In our Grand Am, we ventured down this dirt road until it had become a narrow clearing that resembled more of a deer feeding path than a road. We must have been travelling at  0.5 mph because the ‘path’ was strewn with large rocks, larger holes, tree branches etc. I think we got stuck a couple times and had to move things out of our way.

It was similiar to our Colorado drive, I suppose. Equally ridiculous. Well at some point we finally stopped in the middle of this forest, the path long gone and our car angled between trees. Why we drove this mile into the forest I have no idea. Parcels of land do not identify themselves in the middle of the woods. Whether we were on, near, around, under or over the subject property – we’ll never know. But we searched for it and when we came to the end of the line – we said “Ok, back to the fancy scarves.”

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Adventures of Mark and Dan – Part 4

Posted By: clippershiptravel | Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Adventures of Dan & Mark

By Dan

Adventures don’t have to be big, or epic.  Sometimes trying to find an address in a new city is an adventure. Well, now that I’ve got the Garmin – that won’t be an issue. Nonetheless, we did have a small adventure this week. What’s funny is I didn’t expect the adventure – that’s what made it fun I suppose.

Originally, I intended to make my normal trip to Atlanta to see Mark and his family. But then I remembered that I ought to see if Mike Goode, who also lives in Atlanta, would be up for lunch or something. I haven’t seen Mike since 1990 (maybe for a few minutes in 1992) so lunch promised to be nostalgic and likely short. Nevertheless, I really did want to see Mike again and hear about his adventures over the last 19 years. 19 years. . . that sounds crazy.

So I sent a message to Mike and learned he was up for lunch. I said “what part of town?” and he said “Royal China, 12:00″. That was promising from the get go. Not only does he lack wishy-washy’ness’ or the inability to make a decision – but he’s efficient. Two e-mails and we’ve got a date, time and place. Not bad.

I told Mark I’d pick him up on the way (in the spirit of efficiency) and this adventure began. The Garmin Navigator eliminated any crazyiness associated with finding the place – but finding the place was where it began. We pulled up to a non-descript, typical Chinese restaurant – except for the fact that the parking lot was full. Not only full but the kind of full where you know pulling into the drive that you’re either going to get lucky and park next to the front door or you were going to park next to the dumpster of the neighboring business. We did the latter.  Walking up we then noticed that everyone entering the place was Asian. Now this has got to be a good sign. Not only is this place full, but Asian people are eating there.

Seriously when you go out for Chinese – do you ever see Asian people there? No – that’s because Chinese food is really just food influenced by Chinese recipes but Americanized so that we buy it. We figured immediately that we were in for something good.

Then we entered the place and the noted that the daily specials board was written in Chinese – no English anywhere.  At this point I’m thinking Mike Goode is cool – and he’s picked the perfect lunch spot for adventure seeking boys like Mark and I. Looking around to make sure Mike wasn’t already there, we decided to get a table and wait for him.

Immediately a woman  pushing a cart with dinner rolls in plates of 3 pulled up. She asked in broken English if we wanted some and we said yes, but somehow it was more difficult to get that across. She also gave us a plate with three little shrimp ball things. Cool, bread and appetizers and we haven’t even been given the menu yet.

As we waited for Mike, I decided to try one of these dinner rolls, bit into it and found it to be filled with some sort of red, barbequish meat (that I didn’t like). Almost immediately upon realizing that these weren’t dinner rolls more people in carts with food started coming up to our table. Crazily, we didn’t recognize any food on any cart and decided we better wait for Mike – so we shooed them all away (politely of course).

Everything was plated on small appetizer plates and came in groups of 2, 3 or 4.  And most of it was wrapped in rice tortillas, or bread or something else. And the ‘cart pushers’ didn’t really speak that much English. It was really quite amusing and fun. Well Mike came right away which ended the amusing part but enabled us to start the food adventure part. (I’m going to skip the parts about Mike – what he’s doing and how cool he is because that’s a different story).

So we found out that we were eating Dim Sum (is that spelled right?). It’s like Tapas, but in a Chinese restaurant. It’s not fixed price dining like a Brazillian joint because you pay for each item. There is no menu, which is kind of like a buffett. But it’s more like a moving buffett and you’re wearing a blindfold. Anyway, the food was cool. I can’t tell you what we ate because I don’t really know. Some of it has shrimp in it, some had pork in it – but they were all too different to figure out.  I just know it was a cool adventure and we were both surprised that we hadn’t experienced Dim Sum before. And even stranger is not knowing what it was at all.

Now it wasn’t over there. But, I’ll just say that if you get a chance to go to a Korean cafe, order Bubble Tea. You won’t be disappointed.

Small – but fun. Another good adventure.

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Adventures of Mark and Dan – Part 3

Posted By: clippershiptravel | Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Adventures of Dan & Mark

by Mark and Dan

I’m a list guy, Mark not so much. Mark is a memory guy and a people guy. When we travel, he doesn’t want pictures without people in them; whereas, I’d rather have a few good shots of my traveling companions and a bunch of the things we saw.  Pictures of “things I saw” serve as lists of “things I saw”. How dumb is that? I’ve got a map on my office wall where I highlight all the roads I’ve traveled on and circle the cities I’ve lived in. Another list. I’ve got pint glasses, fridge magnets, books, a blog and christmas ornaments all from the places I’ve been. Lists.

Mark’s got a list, too. But he keeps his in his head like some sort of job security. For me it’s like friend security – without his head I don’t have nearly as many memories. He sent me a list yesterday of memories – almost all of which I remember but wouldn’t have recalled otherwise.  Mark, on the other hand, would likely recall all the roads we’d traveled on without looking at the map. So am I compensating for my lack of a good memory – or are we actually different?

The answer to that is yes. We’re completely different – but the differences work perfectly when we travel. Let’s make a list of the differences . . .

I comprehend Spanish, French and Romanian. Mark’s fluent in German and Hungarian. Together we can conquer Europe.

I’ll start the dancing and get everyone on the dance floor. Mark’s the reason people actually talk to us and the reason I don’t get killed for my ‘outgoing-ness’.

Mark’s the one women see when they enter the bar (brawny, blonde, tall). I’m the guy on the roof drinking Tequila with the Guatemalans.

Mark will climb the side of a cliff without equipment, get stuck and somehow not die. But he’s also the guy that will mountain bike down a mountain, get all the way to the bottom, hit a bump and get thrown into the street. I’m the guy that drives the hour to Denver to get him from the hospital and then locks the keys in the car.

I’m the guy that tries to make as much money as he can so I can live like I don’t make much money. Mark’s the guy who’s content not making much money – but lives and travels like he makes millions. (Yeah – downtown Scottsdale Condo and an almost annual trip to Europe for the summer.)

No matter the differences, we’re both ready to scarf down a giant fried pork tenderloin pizza, once. And we’re ready to use the free rowboat that came with the hostel – even though it’s raining (but that’s a different story). Seriously free means free.  We don’t pass up free.

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Adventures of Mark and Dan – Part 2

Posted By: clippershiptravel | Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Adventures of Dan & Mark

By Dan

We were living in Frisco, Colorado during the summer of 1995. That was the year this story took place.

Prior to the summer’s inception, we’d looked over a bunch of those books that help you find resort work during the summer. I wasn’t pretty enough to get us on a cruise ship – and Mark needed a wingman so he wasn’t going to do that alone. We ended up choosing Colorado, likely because Keystone, Breckenridge, Aspen and Vail were all in close proximity, and we figured someone was bound to hire us.

We left our place in Frisco intent on making a 1:00 appointment with human resources at the Ritz-Carlton in Aspen. We hadn’t been to Aspen yet but looked at the map and knew we had plenty of time to get there; we opted for the scenic route. On the map, the scenic route involved us taking Highway 70 to State Route 24 through Leadville and then north again on 82 up the ‘backway’ to Aspen.  It was so simple, it almost didn’t require a map. Leadville was the first cool town we passed through.  Did you know that it is the highest incorporated city in the United States? According to Wikipedia, it is situated at 10,152 feet above sea level, so don’t plan on running a 5K there until you’ve taken a few deep breaths.

After Leadville we continued our trek south toward State Route 82. Now it’s June and there is some snow on the ground still, but the weather is quite nice. Though we’re dressed quite nicely, it wasn’t cold enough for gloves or boots. We did see a sign or two indicating that Independence Pass was closed – but that was the only real sign that winter was dragging on. State Route 82 ended up being a bit smaller than SR 24, the road through Leadville, but it was still a nicely paved 2 lane road. Not much traffic – just beautiful views.  Shortly after turning onto 82 we came upon another sign indicating Independence Pass was closed. It was a good thing we weren’t planning on going hiking.

A few miles farther up the road, we came to a gate that had apparently been blown closed and actually blocked the road. Mark stopped and I got out to put the arm of the gate back in place so we could continue our journey to Aspen. About 10 minutes more up the road and at a higher elevaation, we noticed that the snow plow had stopped plowing the shoulder, which created a wall of snow right next to the car. A few minutes later it was clear that the snowplow hadn’t finished clearing the other side of the road because the snow was now starting to encroach onto that lane. It was now going to be very tricky to pass on-coming cars if there wasn’t a wider area for passing coming up.

Moments later, the snow plow guy stopped plowing the snow on that side of the road altogether because the road was down to one lane with extremely tall walls of snow on either side of us. We were getting a bit nervous about falling snow – but knew we had to be getting past this soon. Just as it was getting a bit scary and crazy, we rounded a bend to see a giant wall of snow right in front of us. And there sat the snow plow – no workers in sight. So there we were, after having opened a gate that shut off the road, stuck between two 10′ walls of snow on either side of us and directly ahead of us an ice wall.  It was then that we realized why we hadn’t seen much traffic over the last hour.  And clearly if there had been a road sign now- it would have said, “Welcome To Independence Pass, Idiots!” 

I’m sure someone, somewhere got quite a laugh to see two kids in a Pontiac driving frantically backward hoping to get back to civilization before one of the walls melted and landed on our car. To this day – it’s funny to think that we ran into a wall of ice on our way to get jobs at the most prestigious hotel in the Rockies. Boneheads unite!

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